Visibility

A kid in a candy shop could go either way; scarf everything in sight till the vomit comes rising into the mouth, or become so overwhelmed with the choices that he is stunned into inaction - forever dithering over the bewildering choice in front of him. I knew it would happen. It had to. Now I don't know where to turn first, and will be forever stuck in a loop.

Up to now (in order) there was always:

my Gmail account and then (depending on the contents thereof):
any new tweets;
then Flickr;
then this blog.

And always climaxing with music. Sweet music.



Which leads me down its dusky highways to who knows where. It's a wonderful, mysterious adventure...

But that's an aside. The elephant in the room these days is Facebook. It's an incredibly powerful thing, a hyper-fast networking tool, and a revealer of awful truths. The past does not lie when it stares you in the face, and those who were there will have no truck with your bullshit, my friend. Oh no. I still can't quite come to terms with it. People at work have asked to become my friends, but I have so far chosen to ignore them, because some other of my FB friends could easily post something (whether it be in word or picture form) which would compromise my, erm, integrity in the office.

Some names and faces have swum out of the ether, from the mists of the almost forgotten, and seeing and hearing them has caused a whole rush of memories. In some ways, I wish I had never joined, though I am impressed by the slick interfaces and ease of use. As I knew it would, it has to an extent taken over, and those other online loves of my life have suffered as a result. But I know just as well that I will never be able to stop.

Irritations

Update - 2/10/07. Google have responded to my phish report. The account was a spoof Gmail account in addition to being a phish. I hope they track 'em down and cut their balls off. That will make things better for people.

This week, I will write of passwords.

Like a lot of folks round here, I divide my UGC activities between home and (ahem) work. As I am a Mac user at home, and a Windows sufferer in the office, this means I am also cross-platform, though this is increasingly less of an issue.

One example is my Gmail account, which is probably the one I access most often. At home on the Mac, the little box next to 'Remember Me On This Computer' (BTW, I haven't checked the box on that last link. It may not be wise, but if you do so, please tell me what happened) is checked, but I recently changed all of my passwords and the Mac remembers the old one, so if I am not watchful, I have the (admittedly small) inconvenience of going to the password verification page once the first attempt fails. I have tried removing the check, thinking to enter the new password the next time and then to re-check the box, but still, the old password keeps auto-filling.

At work, auto-fill is not an option on almost all website logins (cookies and security or something - I do know that this can be a problem, especially in a shared workstation environment) BUT my Gmail login page remembers the new password anyway.

On the subject of Gmail, spam seems to be on the increase. Not a problem for a long while, but I've had 2 spasms recently, and 1 rather lame attempt at phishing (the email purported to be from The Bank Of America and, as a valued customer - snort - they were seeking to verify my account details. It came from another Gmail account - not even bankofamerica@gmail.com, but some cruddy name and number combination - and the copyright symbol at the bottom was actually a @)

Now, on to Twitter. On the Mac, Twitter autofills my user name and password as soon as I enter the first letter of the former - 3 keystrokes and I'm in. Lovely. At work, I have to tap away manually.

Metafilter - at home, I appear to have (missus) an automatic login - as soon as I hit Login hard enough, I'm straight in, which doesn't seem right as anyone could get in there far too easily. Know what I mean? MeFi doesn't even have a 'Remember Me On This Computer' option. Go figure. At work, manual entry is again required. On a daily basis.

Flickr is OK despite what some people I know have said about entering a lost password hell of Kafkaesque proportions. I log into 2 accounts, and at home, it simply remembers the last name I logged in under, with an option to change user name if necessary. At work, manual completion again. It's all very odd - no doubt due to IP addresses, firewall verifications, etc. etc.